I am not sure it's just a matter of changing their recipe and optimize for power. It ain't that simple. To do this, they have to depart from their core x86 belief, which they do not seem to want to do.

What about all the XP apps that failed to run in Vista and then Windows 7? Some people never left XP. Others bailed on Windows completely. But those who remained, those running Windows 7, about 1/3 the PC market, by self selection are not so attached to legacy code.

I think Windows is, and for some time has been, irrelevant. It's only market advantage is the stable of software and that runs only on Intel. Vendors will not rewrite anything but the most profitable apps (Adobe, MS Office) for ARM because it costs too much and is more a rewrite than a recompile. Look how long it took vendors to support iA64 (64 bit Windows). That was a trivial change compared to Intel vs Arm.

Maybe not. Another artice in this issue had a talking head from Intel who claimed their past preference for computing power over power efficiency was simply that, a choice. That makes sense given that, in the PC market, you could only sell your CPUs for $1000 each ("Extreme" version) if it was faster than everyone elses CPU.
Now they just need to change the recipe and optimize for power consumption. Intel's foundries are at least one geometry node ahead of the ARM guys (ie TSMC). Each node increases efficiency considerably. So they ought to be able to make a better performing part at equal or even lower power.

"it will be interesting to see how well it runs,” said Gold, ...people would take note if Android ran better on the Atom platform than it currently runs on ARM, adding, “there is a chance that will happen.”
What makes anyone believe that it will perform 'noticebly' better? Yes there is a 'chance' but more likely it won't be noticeable.